Customer call centers, or simply, “call centers,” are usually the first direct point of contact for customers seeking direct assistance from manufacturers and service vendors. Call centers are reachable by telephone and provide a single source for customer support and problem resolution. Although World Wide Web-based customer support is becoming increasingly available via the Internet, call centers still offer a convenient and universally-available forum for remote customer assistance.
As customer satisfaction and good will depend significantly on service after the sale, vendors spend substantial time, money and effort in ensuring effective call center operation. Customer assistance professionals are trained in providing both effective and courteous communication and informed and accurate product and service information. Nevertheless, the volume of call traffic can often exceed the capabilities of human customer assistance agents, and a range of automated call center systems are presently used to help bridge the gap between the need to provide responsive assistance and the limits of human call center staff.
Typically, in existing automated call center systems, customers are put on hold until an agent is available to take their call. While on hold, an automated system typically collects information from the customer, such as account number, to determine a priority of service. Such a system may also provide automated menus that attempt to classify the call into basic transaction types, for instance, based on language spoken.
When an agent is available to take the call, the agent will greet the customer, may ask for identification information, and will attempt to determine the nature of the call, often by asking for the same information that the customer previously provided to the automated system. The agent then takes some action, such as performing troubleshooting and providing the caller with instructions for resolving the problem. Further, to assist in improving customer support, the agent will usually log the customer information provided by the caller.
Each customer call is typically an interactive process. During the interaction, the agent may put the customer on hold while the agent gathers information, takes notes, or sometimes handles other customers. Finally, after call completion, the agent will summarize the call as a call log entry. The interactive process is repeated for each new caller throughout the course of the day. This interactive process is time inefficient. Agents are forced to wait for customers to complete their instructions while customers similarly remain on hold while agents are assisting other callers, researching a problem resolution, or creating call logs.
A customer interaction system is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,778,660 to Fromm, issued on Aug. 17, 2004, the disclosure of which is incorporated by reference. The system enables agents to simultaneously process voice contacts from telephonic callers by storing incoming voice signals for time-shiftable and fast playback. Calls are routed to assigned agents when possible. If an agent is busy, the user is asked to state his question for storage in one or more queues. An agent subsequently processes and responds to the question in person, in a manner similar to that utilized in Web chat interactions. Agents respond to voice recordings in the order in which received with additionally provided fast playback that enables an agent to catch up with recorded messages. However, both user and agent messages remain as spoken speech recorded in an audible, non-textual format and accordingly require the full attention of the assigned agent.
Call centers and, in particular, agents, are presented with a related set of problems following the completion of a call from a customer. Incoming calls that originate with callers often need to be reviewed for quality control and to identify common problems, keywords, and patterns that can assist the call center in staying current with customer concerns and in generating post-call statistics. Conversely, outgoing calls that originate with a call center are faced with additional concerns where the call is answered by some form of automated response, such as an answering machine or user call menu.
Efficiently processing calls can be a time-consuming and tedious task, especially where the calls are lengthy or include extended periods of inactivity, for instance, where the caller is placed on hold. Similarly, consistently categorizing the participants in a call can be involved and may require identifying roles, genders, languages, and other characteristics of the call participants. Finally, only a part of a call may be of interest while the remainder can be disregarded. Repeat calls to the same type of callee can often be streamlined, for instance, by generating a call “macro” that navigates through an answering machine or user call menu automatically.
Accordingly, there is a need for an approach to providing automated call center operation that allows highly responsive caller support with a minimum of agent idle time and caller hold time.
There is a further need for an approach to providing efficient caller message processing using transcribed and synthesized speech utterances as an internal medium of communication within the automated call center.
There is a further need for an approach to providing analysis of completed calls, as well as in-progress calls, whether incoming or outgoing relative to a call center. Preferably, such an approach would enable automated processing of calls and identification of participant characteristics.
There is a further need for an approach to providing tools to assist with creating automatic call-outs that streamline the calling process in situations where the pattern of the call is generally known beforehand.